His shame for my sins forced his pointless flight into the place that offered none of the freedoms it had previously promised, the illusory comforts of the familiar language and the same conversations, of the slowly corrupting English words and the joys of capitalism as small and trivial as the cockroaches in a Brighton Beach kitchen. He still does not see the irony in that.
But he does manage to feel superior to me; he feels like he is better because he’s not the one with naked dead girls chasing him through dreams and working hours, crowding in his head during the precious few minutes of leisure. The bar ribbons of all my medals and orders are of no consequence, as if there had been no war after the slow stealthy drives through the streets. Seasons changed but not the girls, forever trapped in the precarious land between adolescence and maturity, and if there were no victories and marching through mud all the way to Germany and back, as if there was nothing else after these girls. Time stopped in 1938, I suspect, and now it just keeps replaying in the house in Malaya Nikitskaya. And I cannot look away and I cannot quit the job in the embassy—not until I either figure out why this is happening or decide that I do not care enough to find out.
I remember the last week I worked in the Tunisian Embassy. The dead girls infected everything, and even the diplomats and the security saw them out of the corners of their eyes—I saw them tossing up their heads on the way to the bathroom, their eyes wide and awake like those of spooked horses. The girls—long-limbed, bruised- pale—ran down every hallway, their faces looming up from every stairwell, every corner, every glass of sweet dark tea the Pakistani cook brewed for me in the mornings.
The diplomats whispered in their strange tongue, the tongue, I imagined, that remained unchanged since Hannibal and his elephants. I guessed that the girls were getting to them too, and for a brief while I was relating to these foreign dignitaries. Then they decided to deal with the problem, something I had not really considered, content in my unrelenting terror. They decided to take apart the fake partitions in the basement.
I was told to not come to work for a few days, and that damn near killed me. I could not sleep at night, thinking of the pale wraiths streaming in the dark paneled hallways of the sky-blue house. But the heart, the heart of it were all these dead girls, and I worried about them—I feared that they would exorcise them, would chase them away, leaving me no reason to ever go back, no reason to wake up every day, shave, leave the house. I could not know whether the semblance of life granted to them was torturous, and yet I hoped that they would survive.
They did not. When I came back, I found the basement devoid of its fake cement partitions, and the bricks in the basement walls were held together with fresh mortar. The corridors and the rooms were empty too—I often turned, having imagined a flick of movement on the periphery of my vision. I looked into the empty rooms, hoping to catch a glimpse of long legs shredding the air into long, sickle-shaped slivers.
I found them after morning came and the cook offered me the usual glass of tea, dark and sweet and fragrant.
“They found all these bones,” he told me, his voice regretful. “Even more than my bag, the one I told you about before.”
“Where did they take them?”
He shrugged and shook his head, opening his arms palms-out in a pantomime of sincere puzzlement. I already knew that they were not in the house, because of course I already looked everywhere I could look without disturbing any of the diplomats’ sleep.
Before I left for the day, I looked in the yard. It was so quiet there, so separate from the world outside. So peaceful. I found the skulls lined under the trees behind the building, where the graveled path traveled between the house and the wall.
I looked at the row of skulls, all of them with one hole through the base, and I regretted that I had never seen Ninochka’s face among the silent wraiths. I did not know which one of these skulls was hers; all of them looked at me with black holes of their sockets, and I thought I heard the faint rattling of the bullets inside them, the cluttering that grew louder like that of the tin cans dragging behind a running dog.
I turned away and walked toward the gates, trying to keep my steps slow and calm, trying to ignore the rattling of the skulls that had been dragging behind me for the last sixty years.
ONE, TWO, THREE
When Anton and Claudia moved into their new house in an Ohio suburb, they thought it was a sign of how things would be from now on—new and clean and brilliant. Now they could start a family, although Claudia disliked that expression.
“It’s not like we’re not a family,” she told Anton after another phone conversation with her mother. Claudia’s relatives, a loud clan of sun-baked, stocky Bulgars, intimidated Anton to such an extent that he loathed disagreeing with them, even in their absence.
“You know what she means,” he told his wife, and put his arm around her slender hips. “It’s just not the same without children.”
Claudia nodded and gently wrestled from under his heavy arm. “I better get the dinner started,” she said. She slipped into the kitchen and chopped onions and carrots, then tenderized chicken cutlets with a wooden mallet. She would never be enough for him, she thought. She wanted a baby, sure enough, but she wished it were not required to be complete.
When Anton started his new job, she stayed home, working in the garden, building a chicken coop, embroidering curtains and knitting baby jumpers, striped green, yellow, and red—her only rebellion against tradition, but she just couldn’t stomach any pink and blue. She fed the chickens, and made pancakes and crepes for Fat Tuesday. When March came, she made martenitsas—little red and white yarn dolls—and hung them over windows and doors to greet the arrival of spring. But she just couldn’t get pregnant.
At first, Claudia resisted seeing the doctor, afraid to give Anton more ammunition he would use to blame her for her inadequacy. Soon she ran out of excuses, and sat in the doctor’s office as the doctor explained the common causes of infertility. Anton’s gray gaze hung over Claudia like a rain cloud, and she knew he was not paying attention to the doctor, but quietly smoldering, furious that his wife was defective.
A few weeks later, when the doctor informed them that there was nothing wrong with her, Claudia felt a short-lived burst of satisfaction. It was Anton who had the problem.
The doctor suggested artificial insemination, anonymous donors. Claudia looked at Anton with hope. She did want a baby, after all, but Anton would not hear of it. Claudia proposed adoption, but he only sighed and shook his dark-haired head. It was expensive, he said; Claudia did not argue, knowing that Anton would not raise a child that was not his.
By the time March came again, Claudia busied herself with tying together bundles of red and white yarn, and hanging her martenitsas above every window and doorway. Most of the residents in Somerville, Ohio did not know what these dolls were, but other Bulgarians instantly recognized the traditional greeting of the springtime. And so did other Slavs, even those that weren’t quite human.
The first sign that something was amiss came when Claudia went into the basement to fetch some pickles and raspberry preserves she’d made last fall. She skipped down the steps, invigorated by the fresh bite in the air, and a large onion flew past her head.
Claudia gave a small cry of alarm, and squinted into the dusk of the basement. Another onion hit her in the shoulder, with little force but startling nonetheless.
“Who’s there?” Claudia said, in English and then Bulgarian. Another onion (that missed badly) was her only answer. Claudia ran over to the barrel with onions, and dodged
another projectile. Her assailant, moving with such speed that its outline blurred, rushed past her and up the stairs. She chased after, encouraged by the fact that her assailant was rather small.
Outside, there was no sign of the attacker, and when Anton came home, he only laughed at her story. However when a horrid racket woke them up in the middle of the night, Anton was not laughing. He grabbed the baseball bat he kept by the bed for such an occasion, and tiptoed into the kitchen, hitching up his pajama bottoms nervously. Claudia followed, less alarmed, feeling vindicated.
Their best china—wedding gifts from countless relatives— lay in shards on the kitchen tiles, glistening in the moonlight seeping through the window. The screen door flapped in the wind. The mysterious little troublemaker
